TakeruK

I have not experienced this before. I do know others who have supervisors that are like this though. I don't think it's a bad thing that you don't want constant supervision but I don't think it's inherently bad that the professor wants to manage his lab in this manner either. The problem is that your styles do not match well! Here are some things you might consider trying: 1. Have an honest and polite conversation with your advisor about how you feel when you are constantly checked up on. 2. Don't change your working habits, and just deliver the reports as requested (i.e. don't let the frequency of report affect your work). Every morning, just deliver the exact same report as you gave the previous evening. Make it clear that when you are closing for the day, you are closing and not working any more. 3. Change supervisors. 4. Adjust your work habits to work with this style of management. My friends in a similar situation as yours have done all 4 of these things. #1 doesn't seem to work well (i.e. it doesn't change anything) but it's usually a good first step. After all, the PI has the prerogative to manage his/her lab the way they want. #2 works the best for the specific professor I'm thinking of. This professor wants their students to work a certain way and so they apply pressure to do so. Sometimes it works and the professor gets what they want (i.e. case #4). But other times, the students make it clear that they don't want to change and if the student is stubborn and firm, the professor relents and basically stops asking for the morning report since it provides no new information (i.e. case #2). Finally, a few students end up just working for someone else (case #3) if they don't want this type of conflict in their life.

The class I TA for does this regularly. What we do is ask each student to send us a PDF of their written work. Then we post them to an online website (that only the class can access) and they download their peers' work and review them. To save you some time, you can assign each class member a unique number or ID and ask them to send you their file as paperXX.pdf where XX is their ID (or you can do it yourself). To save paper, we actually never print anything out -- we ask that all students provide feedback electronically. This works well because we do not ask peers to closely edit each others' papers. Instead, we just ask them to read the paper carefully and provide 3 strong points and 3 weak points, with a suggestion to improve for each weak point. Then, we compile the notes for each paper, remove anything inappropriate and forward it to original author. As for the meta-data, it's something we have not considered before. I just checked the pdf of a file that a student sent last year--no meta-data remained. My class' policy was not to be concerned about that issue but I understand that other people might have different opinions. Edit: You can also have students create a new account specifically for this class to upload files and then they will be responsible for their own removal of meta-data. You can assign usernames to each student (or ask them to tell you) so that you know which account belongs to which student! Edit #2: If you still want to go the paper route--just ask that the student use a codename instead of their real name, so you don't need black marker.

I don't think offers from other schools are very useful for leverage in negotiating because there are so many differences. For example, if you tried to use a non-reach offer to negotiate with a higher ranked school, they are not going to be moved--they'll argue that their degree will have more value etc. Also, it's hard to compare dollar values from places with vastly different cost of living. But even if you could do this, having e.g. a larger number of non-reach acceptances is not going to give you leverage for a reach school. I guess if you only got into your non-reach schools, you can leverage them against each other. The ideal case is to get into multiple reach schools and leverage them against each other. To get more reach acceptances, you need to apply to more reach schools.

Academic dishonesty is a major flag and I think this will severely impact your prospects at graduate education. I think the best way for you to get into a graduate program is to first take responsibility for your actions. Then, you should try to learn from what happened and demonstrate that you have learned from this experience in your graduate school applications. I think this is the one way that a graduate school might give you another chance despite your past academic misconduct (and I don't know how many schools would consider this).

I think you might have misunderstood (or the original source wrongly stated) the fact that admission chances might be higher if you don't require funding from the school. This is only true because usually, the student has funding from a prestigious external fellowship and this increases your chances mostly because you earned the prestigious external fellowship, not because of the external funding. In fact, although this may depend on field, I feel that the main barrier for a program to accepting more students is not lack of money to pay grad students but lack of other resources like professor time, class space, etc. (Note: this lack of other resources is still money based, but it's not because they have to pay grad students!) Thus, some schools in my field even explicitly say that you are only accepted with full funding and they will not consider personally funded students. Also, I think if you try to imply that you are willing to pay your own way completely, it might appear as if you are trying to "buy" your admission, and this will definitely reflect poorly on you. So, I would not try to indicate this at all. There is one exception though. In most applications, there is a section on financial aid. Usually there is a question like "Do you wish to be considered for financial aid?" or "Would you still attend this program without any funding offer?". You can answer "no" to these questions. However, many applications have this question as a requirement to the Graduate School, and the answer might not affect your admission at all.

I guess it is a little strange that your writing advisor suggests you find a proofreading service but does not make any recommendations! One problem with looking online is that there are a lot of companies out there that only exist to scam people in need! My suggestion would be to find graduate students at your school looking to earn some extra money. Perhaps you can post some flyers in the English department or email the department admin staff with your "job request" and ask them to send it to all grad students in the department. I have not done this myself, but the idea behind this advice comes from my own experience as a Physics grad student. Often, parents of high school students or undergrad students looking for tutoring will seek tutors in this way. My department even had a webpage with the contact of all grad students who indicated they are interested in tutoring work for pay (maybe your school's English department has a similar directory).

I agree with everyone else that you should apply for fit, not rank! In my case and I suspect many others, higher ranked schools are probably going to be a better fit for me. For example, my research interest involves using giant telescopes that are very expensive and it's the schools that have the money to buy out a large chunk of time on these telescopes for their students and faculty. The schools with this type of resources generally will spend them on other things too and it's pretty clear from the ranking list that size of endowment is positively correlated with ranking! So after creating my top list based on fit, it turns out that most of them end up being in the top 10. When I wrote my advice above about aiming higher, I don't mean to just aim for the top 10 ranked schools! What I meant was to find the best fit for your career goals (and don't underestimate the power of money available for you) and then do not rule out any great research match/fit just because of rank / perceived difficulty. (**Note: in some cases, school "brand power" is important to your career goals. For example, if you are looking to work outside of academia and you just need a degree to attest to your qualifications [your dissertation quality might not matter], then the brand name of the University might be more important than the rank/reputation of that department in your field). I think a lot of people are risk-adverse so if for example, we find 20 schools that would be a good research fit for us, with 10 in the "top tier" (i.e. "reach") and 10 in a lower tier ("non-reach"), and we only wanted to apply to say 12 schools, we might pick mostly from the "non-reach" pool. If you do this, you might end up with mostly acceptances. My advice is that once you determine what schools are a good match, don't be afraid to stack your list more heavily towards the "reach" schools (e.g. 8 reach schools and 4 non-reach). You might end up only with a few acceptances, but the total number of acceptances is not as important as the quality of fit of the acceptances. You can only attend one school! i.e. It's far better to get 3 reach acceptances than 8 non-reach acceptances.

I definitely agree that might be the case. But if there is a requirement to let them know in order to be considered for a MS program, then you are missing out if you don't let them know. For me, this risk was not present because I do not want to be in any unfunded MS programs so I didn't mention it since I won't miss out on a MS. So, it's a matter of what's more important to you. In my opinion, unfunded MS degrees are not really worth it, so I would not mention it at all. However, you can always email the department admin staff to ask the question and the conversation probably will not be sent to the admission committee. Also, you can use a different email address and not identify yourself if you are really worried.

I think that is the most likely case. Especially if you have to tick a box in order to notify the applicant (he might have just missed that box).

In that case, I would recommend that you talk to the TA if you feel you are struggling with the material in some way. I'm not sure how these assignments are graded. If they are purely objective then perhaps you can work with the TA to identify some area where you seem to be doing poorly and perhaps the TA has some suggestions on how to improve in these areas. If there are subjective aspects to the grading, then it might be a good idea to talk to the TA about the expectations so that you can better meet them in the future. I would also try to schedule time with the professor as well because it might be the case that the professor will be grading the final paper whereas the TA grades the homework and midterm. In any case, the professor and TA are there to help you learn the material so I think the best first step is to talk to them to get feedback on previous assignments and apply their advice to the final paper. Good luck!

If you are worried about your grade, then the best course of action, in my opinion, is to schedule an appointment by email to meet with the professor. Tell the professor that you are worried about your performance in the class thus far. Don't make excuses (especially not what you wrote here). Ask for feedback on how to do better on the remaining material (the big paper). Then, take this feedback earnestly (ask for clarification if necessary) and earn a high grade on your big paper.

Sometimes the application asks you if you would consider a MS program if you don't get an offer for a PhD program. From talking to other graduate students, I find that the unfunded MS offer comes on its own if they want to offer you a MS admit. However, if you are worried about not being considered for the MS program if you don't get into a PhD program, you should ask each specific program ahead of time whether or not you should send in a separate MS application, or if you should indicate you are applying for both MS and PhD program in your application etc.

Don't worry!! (easier said than done, I know). Not all schools send LOR received confirmation and some schools might send them later. Also, just because they use the same applyyourself.com system does not mean every school will use every feature of that system the same way.

The short answer is yes. In some fields (fields that offer unfunded masters), sometimes schools will first make all funded PhD offers to students that it has space/money for, and then offer unfunded masters programs to some of the remaining applicants. It's unlikely this will happen if the program you are applying to does not offer terminal masters degrees at all. However, whether or not it's a good idea to take an unfunded masters offer depends on you and what you want to achieve! Also, professors that say "it is unlikely that I will be taking students for Fall 2015" is usually a bad sign. If all of the professors you are interested in at a school say that, then I would not apply there! Keep reaching out until you find professors that are interested in you. Finally, yes, grad school admission (and almost everything else beyond grad school) is based a lot on chance. For example, the amount of students that are accepted into my program varies each year based on the number of students accepted in previous years and amount of funding available. Thus, it's possible that the exact same applicant can be accepted in 2012 but rejected in 2013. You do need a little bit of luck! The best way to mitigate this is to apply to a larger number of schools.

You don't have to mention it in your SOP or CV or anything. This change will not cause any problems at all with human readers. This is because when you tell them your GRE score or when you attach the transcript, a human will clearly know that First T. Last is the same as First TXXX Last. However, you might run into a problem with computers correctly auto-matching your documents with your applications. I had this problem at one school, my middle name is two words, let's say it's "One Two". In some documents, my name instead appears as "One-Two" or "OneTwo" or "One". At one school, after you submit your application, you get login info to check the status of arrival of things like GRE scores. I noticed that at this school, my Transcripts and GRE score status said "Not Received" for several weeks after they should have been received. When I emailed the school to check, a person confirmed that they do have the right GRE/transcript attached to my file since day one, however, the computer that auto-updates the status failed to match "One-Two" as the same name as "One Two". They said they never bother correcting the online status display but there was nothing I needed to worry about. And for publications/patents, you don't have to explicitly say that your name is different. In fact, a ton of people publish with names that are not their legal names because there is no requirement to publish under your legal name. What you should do is list your published materials in your CV with the name that appears in the journal. The convention in my field is to put your own name in bold when listing your publications to indicate which one is you. In my applications, I list my full name but I never publish with my middle initials.

I don't think you should mention it as an "excuse". However, I have read advice and opinions from women in academia both for and against mentioning maternity leave at all. The advice for mentioning leave is usually to put it in your CV instead of your SOP. For example, something like "March 2013-December 2013: Maternity and Parental leave" in the appropriate spot during your experience section. This might be useful if you need to explain a gap in your history, or want to show why your degree took longer, or why your fellowship was extended etc. This advice might also make more sense for someone post-PhD too, as some fellowships/funding sources require you to be within X years of your PhD and in some cases, time on leave does not count towards this limit. The advice against mentioning leave is that it just gives bad people another reason to discriminate against you. Also, in some countries, like the US, maternity leave is so short that it's almost not worth mentioning since it does not create any kind of gap in your history. Note: this advice has a slightly Canadian slant. For context, in Canada, mothers can get maternity and parental leave up to a total of 52 weeks, and parents can take up to 35 weeks for parental leave.

I agree with sending both as well.

I applied to 8 schools. I would say 6 out of 8 of them were "reach" schools and two were "safety" (sure that I would get in) schools. One safety school was a Canadian school (in case I changed my mind about moving to the US) and the other was a US school that was in the top 10 for my field but not generally considered a top 10 school (it was also a contingency plan in case I needed to go to grad school near family). I chose my safety schools mostly for practical reasons in case something came up that required me to be either in Canada or near family but still wanted to go to grad school. I was prepared for the outcome where I would be rejected everywhere because the statement "I would rather go to any grad school than no grad program at all" does not describe how I felt. In honesty, if I had only gotten into the safety schools, I probably would have also strongly considered my other plan, which would not have involved grad school at all! Like maelia, my list was also top heavy because I feel that grad school is such a big gamble (i.e. a large investment of my time and potential earnings) for limited opportunities. My goal is not necessarily tenure track position so my reasoning was not exactly the same as maelia's, but I also agree that I felt going to a "non-reach" school would not be worth it for me in the long run. So, I made all of my US school selections as programs that were better than the best Canadian school I could get into. 7 out of 8 programs were in the top 10 for my field (the only one that wasn't in the top 10 was the Canadian safety school). When I apply to jobs post-PhD, I plan on using the same strategy (aiming high and have a backup plan). I would rather quit academia than work at a postdoc position that does not meet my goals/desires.

That's true--it could work out! The prof in my example also said that if I went to work for him, the goal would be to write grant proposals while I was TAing until I get one funded. I don't mean to imply that everyone should always choose to avoid projects with no funding. However, I made my personal decision to avoid this project because I don't want to be spending my grad school years writing grant proposals or TAing for 20+ hours every semester. I want to be spending my grad school years doing research! Of course, there are still some benefits if I had taken the project: 1) get to do a really cool project, 2) get great experience with grants, but I felt that the risk was not worth the reward. I can easily see this extra obstacle (increased time away from research writing grants and TAing) costing me 1-2 extra years to finish the project and reducing opportunities like travel to conferences or purchasing computing resources. There were also other reasons: the prof in question was not famous like in your example and the school's stipend is well below the poverty line, so additional financial stress would negatively impact my performance as well. Overall, I felt that the chance for success was small and the consequences of failure were too great. I am very flexible in my research interest and make my choices in project based on future opportunities rather than personal interest in topics, and there were many other equally interesting and better funded projects. Your prof's story is also an example where you don't have to attend the program with the very best research fit / highest ranking as it sounds like she attended a different program yet was still successful (i.e. a professor). Again, I didn't intend to advise all students to avoid projects without funding! People should make the decision that best fit their goals, and my goals/desires preclude unfunded projects!

You definitely cannot send Verbal score from one test and Quant score from another! However, I think the OP is asking for a situation like this: June 2014 test: 162/161/4.5 Oct 2014 test: 160/160/4.5 And the OP wants to send the June 2014 test scores using ScoreSelect. However, ScoreSelect is supposed to only send the single score you select (if you choose to send one set only) and the school is not supposed to know that the OP also took the test in Oct 2014 but chose not to send it. The wording that I quoted from the ETS website confirms this, but the OP is worried because there is a box that says "Most Recent: ____" on the sample test report that ETS links to. In my opinion, I think what would happen if the OP chose only the June 2014 score, then the test report should say "Most Recent: June 2014" because I think the "Most Recent" box on the score report refers to the most recent test score submitted, otherwise the ETS website will be in contradiction of itself.

I had a similar situation--it wasn't a semester abroad but my MSc school was in the same city as another school and grad students from one school often take classes from the other, and they count towards their own school's degree requirements. This was also administered in part of an Ontario-wide program. So, I had one single course as a "visiting student" from this other school. This was what I put for various fields, in order of preference (i.e. I would try the first option, then if not allowed, I would move down the list): A. For degree start/end dates, I put: 1. 2011 / (blank) 2. 2011 / 2011 B. For degree name: 1. "Visting MSc Student" 2. "Other" (if drop down menu) 3. Leave it blank if possible 4. "MSc" (if drop down menu without an other option and not allowed to leave blank) C. For GPA questions, I just put the course grade for the one course I took! Finally, I also made sure the reason why I included the school was clear in every place possible. I noted it in my CV. If there was a box for comments in the application form alongside the school info, I noted it there. I also put the explanation in the "special comments" box that usually appears on the last page.

Is it showing "not received", or is there no information shown at all? If it's the former and you ordered the score report over a month ago, I would check with the school. If it's the latter, then yes, it's normal for some schools to not report any info at all. If you are worried then you can contact them to check.

I do not think this is true for STEM programs, unless the school has a specific quota of the number of in-state admits it must make. If so, by nature of a smaller pool of applicants to compete against, your chances may be higher. In-state students will cost the department a little bit less in the first year (out of state students take about a year to achieve residency). But this extra cost for one single year is unlikely to influence admission decisions. On the other hand, international students, who can never achieve in-state residency will cost extra for the entire program, which does generally make it harder for international students to get into public state schools.

I agree with what ss2player said. Sometimes you just can't change people and it's healthy to have friends that are completely outside of academia. However, I'm definitely a type of person that will default to "safe" topics like classes or work or science when I can't think of good conversation to make! Even if I desperately want to be talking about something else. I found that in my first year, my default conversation topic was school because that's what I knew I had in common, but as time went on, I know my cohort a lot better and we have lots of conversations that are about our science as well as other common interests! But I find that when trying to talk to new students that I don't know as well, I tend to default back to "safe" topics. So, one strategy might be to assume others are like you, wanting to change the topic, but like me, are not great at conversation and they don't know how. One thing that we did to help us avoid talking about work was to make it into a game, kind of. Like, when we are at lunch, or at dinner or getting drinks etc. we just make it a "rule" that we can't talk about work. And if someone slips and accidentally says something, the others jokingly and gently remind them. Eventually, it just becomes natural to find other topics, especially if the "forced topic change" opens up and reveal other common interests! Also, you could try to find other "safe" conversation topics that are not work related. e.g. "What did you do last weekend?" or "What are your weekend plans?" However this can backfire during stressful times since the answer might be "working!". But maybe you can think of other topics! And even if you are more skilled at conversation than me (i.e. you don't need "safe" topics), people like me appreciate when you start a conversation that way since that's how we can learn new, non-work related, "safe" topics.

I was going to write an addendum but deleted it because I thought it might be too long, but bsharpe brings up a good point. I actually only gave my letter writers the list of deadlines and prof names. I did not write a "list of points" because all my LOR writers are my research supervisors that I have talked with about grad schools for many hours. I did include the other stuff I mentioned on this page (GRE, research interest etc.) but I managed to fit it all onto the "list of deadlines" page. So, my "package" was only a single page. I definitely agree with bsharpe's suggestion to sit down and talk with each LOR writer prior to sending these packages. It would be a good time to ask them what extra info they might want and also figure out how they wanted to be reminded about LORs. One prof assured me that email reminders are greatly appreciated and that I should not feel bad about sending them, especially if it's past the deadline. Another prof asked for a specific reminder schedule so that the request appears in his inbox at the right time! I think talking to your profs might also be a good idea because the advice we're giving might 1) work best for our fields, but not yours and 2) what our profs wanted might be very different than yours!